


The Vampire - Funeral Pyres Outtake

by pinkyapples



Category: Original Work, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-08 22:50:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11091561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkyapples/pseuds/pinkyapples
Summary: A character study for my original character The Vampire introduced in previous work Funeral Pyres.  No Teen Wolf character is mentioned within this story until the end and even then just alluded to.  Just how I pictured the Vampire character of that story and also how generally think of vampire in fiction.





	The Vampire - Funeral Pyres Outtake

You don’t recall dying.

You awaken to a cacophony of sound and obnoxious smell.  Maybe it’s a forest.  Maybe it’s a squalid hut.  Perhaps a village street muddy and rank with garbage.  None of it matters.  All you know is that you need to feed and follow that instinct till sated.  Whether or not you are aware of the bodies that surround you is uncertain.  There is a moment of satisfaction before that need to feed is upon you again and you follow the instinct.

Instinct defines you.  Determines your journey through forest to village to town to city.

Sometimes, you are aware of something other than the need to feed.  A fleeting memory of a place or a face.  Occasionally, there is an awareness of some other way of being before your present existence. On those occasions you resist instinct and remain still. 

Still in a time and place, observing the living and trying to recall if life for you was ever this much of a struggle.  There are fleeting memories of poverty and an illness that decimated your village.  You’ve heard it called a Black Plague.  You think the name accurate. 

It is late in the year and the days are short.  You can move with relative ease and the sunlight does not cause you such pain. Curious that sunlight should now be something you shun while moonlight invigorates you.  You don’t really know the reasons why sunlight burns harsher than before.  It just does.  You can walk amongst the living during the day.  If the sunlight burns, you seem to heal readily enough from the burns once you have fed.

Here, in this strange country you have chosen to be still, there is strife and discord.  There is a man the people talk about, look to follow, to challenge their oppressors. Vlad III Dracula is charismatic.  A warrior leader. You and he are like minded. He becomes your first friend.

He is struck down with illness on the eve of an important battle and you wear his amour for the duration.  You win the battle and his enemies are cowered.  You return to his bedside and talk to him while he battles the fever.  He asks you why his enemies cowered and you show him your true face.  The fever is highest and you don’t think he’ll survive.

He does. 

The legend of Vlad “The Impaler” is born and you and he keep it until his enemies finally defeat the man.  You guard his secret in the years that follow as repayment for a human strong enough to bear the burden of your true nature.  In another century you will read book written about your adventures with Vlad.  He calls you a vampire.  He calls Vlad, Count Dracula.  You think the story a fitting tribute to your friend. 

You return to instinct and leave behind stillness.

You meet the first ‘supernatural’ being during The Protestant Reformation and subsequent European Witch Trials.  An age old hag or witch, though she does not look more than a child of ten.  Her eyes betray her true nature as do your own.  The Witch Hunters burn her entire family but leave the guilty child free.  You cannot leave the village square fast enough, the urge to laugh is so strong.  Later in the evening you join the village holy man to keep the ‘innocent’ child company and pray for the souls of her heathen family.

For a time you and she are partners.  The Witch introduces you to other creatures of the night and for the first time you are not alone.  She gives you a charm to hide your true nature from the humans and allow you to walk in the summer sun without burning instantaneously.  You watch her board The Mayflower and embark upon a new adventure. 

It is the 18th Century and you live in France.  You dwell alongside a pack of werewolves at the foot of the Margeride Mountains.  You save a beloved cub and the wolf pack reluctantly welcomes you.  You understand their hesitancy.  You have no need for a family grouping.  You need no coven to share and focus you power as a witch might.  You have no innate need for a pack the way wolves and werewolves do.  You don’t require a roost, an enclave, a clan, a pod or any other name meaning grouping of a species together as a family unit.

You have heightened senses of specifically hearing, taste and smell.  You heal abnormally fast and run like the wind.  You are practically invisible under cover of dark or shadows.  Your sight is excellent although not as good as the wolves you live amongst.  Touch you find abhorrent, but so to those who touch your skin.

There is unrest amongst the human population.  Feral wolves are attacking livestock and accused of attacking people.  There have been mysterious deaths and talk of a Beast roaming the province of Gervaudan.

Now is the first time you encounter humans with knowledge of the supernatural and determination to hunt and kill.  They claim to hunt in the name of The King, of God, of Justice.  However, like things of humankind, it boils down to money and politics.  The wolf pack you are living with fall victim to such claims and you keep the name Argent locked in your memory.  You delight in the years that follow depriving them of male heirs and thwarting their murderous claims upon innocent werewolves.  The guilty can take care of themselves.  You become the bane of the Argent Family. Alluded to in their Bestiary and folk hero amongst the werewolf packs of Europe.

In the long years since your death and rebirth as a creature of the night you have amassed great wealth and experience.  You have visited places called museums and art galleries.  Ingratiated yourself into society homes, gaming halls, estates and palaces. In these environs you have observed and mimicked the fashions of the day, the mannerisms and labyrinth of spoken and unspoken rules of society.  The intrigue and politics of those around you provide amusement.  You become friends with the bright young things of the day and unwitting inspiration for another fictional monster.  You rather like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein better than Dracula.

However, mid-19th century Europe no longer interests you and although you have lived and even thrived in the Northern and Eastern Nations of Europe, it is time for a change.  You board a ship.  Sea life doesn’t agree with you and you take one of the ships lifeboats and row ashore.  Unwittingly your presence upon the ship and subsequent departure leads to what will become known as the story of the Marie Celeste.

You only learn of this many years later when you finally re-emerge in Cairo, Egypt on the eve of the 20th century.  The 20th Century is exuberant.  Everything is an assault upon the senses and something long dormant awakens within you.  It cannot be called a soul but it gives you pause enough that the fop who should have been an evening’s snack as you both watched the sunset upon the Pyramids of Egypt becomes a bridge to this new century of excess.

You manipulate him into sobriety and creating a family and then observe their rising and falling of fortunes through the century.  When the main family falls by the wayside you guide and observe their cousins and other descendants.  They emigrate to America and you follow.  America is big, bright, brash and boisterous in a way that Europe and even Africa had not been.

The country re-invigorates you.  You arrange shipment of the collected booty of lives long past and settle in the American state of Maine.  The descendants of The Witch live in Massachusetts and for a time you keep in contact with each other.  But your own kin move west and you follow, always parallel to their lives and helping where need be.  To some you even reveal who you truly are.  That’s when you become aware of the cult of the vampire.  They ask you to turn them.  Curiosity leads you to try, only to discover that such a thing doesn’t exist and only drives the human insane.  Much like the character Renfield in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula.  The book you quite enjoy and think it honors the man you knew. 

Their insanity is strange to observe.  Some are physically violent.  Some suffer psychosis.  An unhappy few are both.  Others become obsessed about a particular subject, or behavior, or person.  You are strangely proud that these failed vampire are amongst the most homicidal of psychopaths and sociopaths to be found in modern America.

However humans are not immortal, and by the dawning of the second millennium the descendants of that long forgotten Egyptian would-be-snack number under twenty.  Of those there are only a handful that are of an age to procreate and even less that are sexually inclined to do so.

When the dead rise up and start walking the earth as fact and not fiction, your descendants now live in Oregon.  They are gathered to celebrate a wedding when you reveal who, and what, you are.  It is not well received.  You think it has more to do with the fact that you beheaded most of their wedding party, rather than your being a vampire.  Nonetheless you pack up the survivors and take them to find other survivors with whom they can try and live.  You don’t hold much hope and taking their ice-cream truck drive away leaving them to their fate.

For months you revert to your base instincts.  You feed, seek shelter from the sunlight, then feed again.  Sometimes you meet human survivors.  You give the saner ones a chance to survive and the insane a quick death.  Zombies you behead and leave to rot where they fall.  For a while you used your hands but a chance encounter with a turned supernatural changed that practice.  You don’t know what it originally was, you suspect it must have been a werewolf.  Somehow you managed to impale the creature long enough to rip its head off.  Since then you carry machetes. 

The experience refocuses you.  Makes you hunt only animals.  Something you had not done for centuries.  The virus that makes people zombies doesn’t seem to affect the animal kingdom.  Why that is, you don’t know. Nor particularly care, your food source is secure and that’s all that matters.  You notice a slight dulling of your senses and some loss of strength but not enough to adversely affect your continued existence.

It is six months before you start hearing rumors of a safe haven to the south.  You follow them and find a town in northern California called Beacon Hills.  You observe from afar the township, its inhabitants.  There live both supernatural and human together in a way you have never seen before.  They seem to have a plan that looks to a future other than day to day survival.  It is commendable and after seeing how they defend their small town you believe they will succeed.

The wall being built seems to circle the town in a semicircle West-southwest to the East-northeast.  There is forest to the north of the town, more difficult to secure but somehow guarded.  When you approach the town from that direction you discover they must have a magic user amongst their populace. 

Upon further observation you learn that at the centre of things is a wolfpack, led by a True Alpha.  There are other supernatural creatures amongst the pack members and one who you suspect to be a Banshee.

You have only come across a Banshee once in a previous life.  An acquaintance of the Witch child and the only supernatural who has made you experience a profound sense of calm.  They tell you it is because you have been born of death. 

She is, perhaps, only the second person in all you existence you would call a true friend.  She tells you that by your side her powers are muted and the anguish of the dying is bearable.  You miss her when she dies and for a while keep company with her kin but none show any signs of being banshee so you leave.

This town seems determined to survive and something draws you to it and the resilience of its population.  They will need more accommodation for when more survivors discover this haven.  That means ridding the town of remaining zombies and defending the northern border and forest preserve.

You set up home in a modest house the northernmost edge of the town and begin the process of clean-up.  The funeral pyres you lit are huge, sometimes they draw in more zombies.  The third one you lit brings you into contact with the two who defend the town.  A werewolf and a mage, as well as the banshee and her wolf guardian.

You meet the Alpha and are offered residence.  You decline but hand over the keys to homes you have cleansed of the dead, ready for the living.

You meant what you said to the young True Alpha.  Your life is a cycle of blood.  You hear it flowing in all living beings, animal and human.  You smell the smallest drop as well as the open wound.  You are constantly driven by the need to feed and only centuries of existence has given you the willpower needed to overcome that instinct. 

You are not a team player and that is what Alpha McCall needs from his pack and followers.  You will stay and help defend this town because there is nowhere else to go and you need a sense of purpose to continue to survive.  Whether that will be enough for this young pack, you do not know.

You do know that when the time comes and they perceive you as more threat than alley your death will be swift and final.  Perhaps the banshee will even scream for you. 


End file.
